Fighting terrorism: It's an ideological war

Fighting terrorism: It's an ideological war

Noor Huda Ismail, Jakarta

It was not surprising when convicted terrorist Imam Samudra,
sentenced to death for his role in the Bali bombing in 2002, in
his autobiography titled Me against the Terrorist contains harsh
justifications for the Bali attacks that could inspire other
militants.

This year, Nasir Abbas, a reformed Jamaah Islamiyah member
told me that one of the bombers in front of the Australian
Embassy in September 2004 was inspired by Samudra's book to join
'the jihad'. In August 2005, while in police detention in Ambon,
Asep Djaja (31), one of the alleged terrorist members who were
involved in the police attack on Seram Island expressed the same
thing to me.

The book has been receiving a very good response among
militants. In my interview with Achmand Michdan, Samudra's
attorney who wrote the foreword, he said that thousands of copies
had been distributed in at least seven cities across islands of
Java and Sumatra. Michdan said that the publisher was considering
translations of the book into English, French and Arabic.

Last month, Indonesia's top clerics and Muslim intellectuals
formed a special task force, dubbed the "antiterror team". It has
been reported that Samudra's book is on the top of the list of
books for them to study.

The team will face some difficult tasks amid the fact that the
Indonesian public is skeptical about the existence of such a
terrorist problem. Worse still, I interviewed some members of
this new team a couple of years ago and their collective view was
that the whole war against terrorism was part of a plan to weaken
Islam. Some even asked: "Who is the 'real' terrorist?"

Of course Samudra is, to one group of people, a "terrorist",
but he may well be a "freedom fighter" to another group.

Other examples of such definitions that depend upon which side
one is on were the Nazi occupiers of France. They denounced the
"subnational" and "clandestine" French Resistance fighters as
terrorists. During the 1980s, the International Court of Justice
used the U.S. Administration's own definition of terrorism to
call for an end to U.S. support for "terrorism" on the part of
Nicaraguan Contras opposing peace talks.

One may say that Samudra's ideas in his book are just
"nonsense" and "groundless". But, in fact, his ideas can be
traced back to the Egyptian radical Muhammad al-Faraj, who was
executed by Cairo in 1982 for his role in the assassination of
President Anwar Sadat.

Faraj's pamphlet, The Neglected Obligation, was influenced by
the works of al Banna, Maududi and Qutb that brought their
insidious, absolutizing ideas to their ultimate conclusion. Faraj
asserted that the "Koran and Hadits were fundamentally about
warfare". He also said that not just infidels, but even Muslims
who deviated from the moral and social dictates of sharia were
legitimate targets for jihad.

While Samudra's global awareness becomes evident by his
statement: "Remember, the main duty of Muslims is Jihad in the
name of God, to raise up arms against the infidels, especially
now the United States and its allies", was inspired by the
teaching of charismatic Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, a key mentor
of Osama bin Laden. Azam met the family of Qutb and was friendly
with the "blind sheikh" Omar Abdur Rahman, who would later be
implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Azam, who
recruited non-Afghan Mujahidin, including Southeast Asians like
Samudra, began to set his sights on bigger things. He argued that
the struggle to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan was in fact
"the prelude to the liberation of Palestine" and other "lost"
territories.

To prevent the spread of Samudra's ideas there must be a
campaign to delegitimize them -- not to just arrest or kill him.
Samudra's ideas occupy an enormous influential and important
symbolic position, which is often inextricably connected to the
organization's very existence. Therefore, the public diplomacy
campaign to discredit his ideas is even more important than his
actual arrest or death.

Islam is a peaceful religion, and the mere possibility of
multiple interpretations of holy war as a way of defending an
Islamic community that is under attack and the strong religious-
political desire to found a caliphate on strict sharia principles
is, in my opinion, the main reason for today's exclusionary
radicalism and terrorism coming from Islamic circles.

"As long as within Islam itself a fundamental process of
rethinking of and public debate on ancient values (and especially
the concept of jihad) in a modern, highly technological and
globalized cultural environment, its exclusive religious and
political aspirations and above all its too literal
interpretation of the surah (chapter) of the Koran, Islam itself
will remain a breeding ground for violent and undemocratic
movements," explains Frans G. de Kuijer, a western social
researcher who lives in Yogyakarta and is married to a Javanese
Muslim.

Mind: in a democracy like today in Indonesia, political Islam
has the best chance to reach the above-mentioned goals within the
existing political-legal structure. A lot of "injustice" towards
non-Muslims today can be explained by the fear of the
democratically chosen governments to openly criticize or to
strongly oppose the "unlawful" behavior of hard-liners.

Thus, to halt the bombings we also need research to understand
the dynamics of the ideas of the group together with its
arrangement of psychological and cultural relationships that are
attracting and forging dozens, possibly hundreds, of mostly
ordinary people into a terrorist organization.

This call for research demands more patience and there is no
magic bullet to solve this problem. The awareness should be built
because the cost of ignorance is too severe to consider.

The writer earned a British Chevening scholarship and is now
undertaking a postgraduate program on International Security
Studies at St. Andrews University. He can be reached at
noorhudaismail@yahoo.com.